Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, because it leans heavily towards the classic end of the category and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because none of them makes usable without the rest.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of regions where daylength barely changes through the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such plants often start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains a earlier decisive end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography misses the point hidden in it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of a range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first pass for a room with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is seldom caught out.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large proportion in many old sativa lines and responsible for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in storage than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line most likely has real old-sativa ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And when the you wants that smell to survive to the jar, the drying has to be slow and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line to something that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis line has some tendency for it; sativa plants express it more often, for one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and a old that has gone past its intended end frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a final effort to make seed.
None of this means a sativa strain unstable by course; it means the room’s consistency count for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is done rather than a weeks after take away the greater part of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for any other category.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to one region by local growers and growers alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range widely than any tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still not uniform. A shop offering “landrace” without a origin region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering lines need the autumn days to go on long enough for the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or watches it rot in November. The further south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude growers are able to ripen plants that northern growers cannot.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every degree north of that moves the date later towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress response, typically from light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a problem that was never there, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already long flower further. The breeder seldom warns which type to expect; the parentage generally does.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term and not a measurable one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the listing, which occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other releases.
The experience people associate with a word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene profile and by THC content than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat couch result and a good number of the opposite stock do exactly the reverse. For a grower the label is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is a fact to read before choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.